A Sci-fi short

Allow me to introduce, Bridget McMillan.
"Thank you" said the young astronomer.
"I'm here today to talk to you about recent images in visible to low infrared wavelengths of the black hole M82 X-1. There, circled in green, is the object that has come to be called "The Dollop" due to its resemblance to a dollop of whipped cream. It was thought to be an hunk of ice in the accretion disk of the hole, but I am here to show you otherwise. Once the gravitational lensing effect of the hole is accounted for, the dollop appears as a crescent shape. What you a looking at is really a planet orbiting the star HD 10864. Due to these lucky circumstances caused by the black hole, we have the highest resolution visible light image of a extra-solar planet to date."

McMillan beamed with enthusiasm. The already impressed crowd of professors and lecturers, all at least twice her age, had no clue what she still had in store for them. She could not possibly have prepared them more than she already had.
"Now direct your attention to the three dim stars just above the crescent. They are obviously no closer than HD 10864, but if they were farther away, they would be occluded by the planet, Thus, I humbly suggest that these lights are not stars, but cities."

The air conditioner hummed in contemplation in the silent auditorium. Skeptical whispers seeped in and gradually, a commotion grew unstoppably louder. After about thirty seconds, there were people almost shouting at each other. Some were drafting unlikely theories to explain the dim lights, others whooping about aliens and parties and probes.

The transit time was 2442 years. 2002 to get the probe to the planet, 440 for the light to get back to us. That was with the the most powerful propulsion system we were capable of: the nuclear pulse drive. Even then the proposal seemed absurd. The amount of refined uranium consumed by the probe's journey could power an entire city for several years. Were we willing to spend all that to see what had emitted a few photons on the dark side of a distant planet 440 earth years ago? What if the civilization was gone by the time the probe got there? self-destructed, ousted by parasites, meteors, or who knows what else? What if we suffered the same fate before the light got back to us? Would our decedents even care enough to be listening when the signal arrived?

While the world's government's and other powerful institutions were weighing their options, astronomers were blasting signals at HD 10864 as loudly and as brightly as they possibly could. People were sending everything from simple blinking light, to multi-channel compressed video. The news media milked the story for three months, while also broadcasting its own signal into space. the noise subsided and only a few dedicated dishes and orbiting mirrors still repeated their signals. eventually people returned to their lives and could extract no more excitement out of the dollop lights.

440 years later, over a dark and desolate wasteland where fires burned constantly and the sky was blacked out by toxic clouds, while observing a black hole, an orbiting satellite took note of a sudden muffled cacophony of jittering light from a main sequence star just behind it. It anxiously relayed the aberration to its surface laboratory with mechanically unwavering hope that it would respond this time with instructions, but none came. Inside the laboratory, the tiny delicate body of a long extinct thing sat perched on its control orb surrounded by lifeless machines.

A context free grammar defining 90% of my voicmails

<message> ::= [<greeting>] [<rationale>] [<request>] [<bye>]

<greeting> ::= <hellotype> [<recipent-name>] [<identification>]

<hellotype> ::= "hi" | "hey" | "hello" | "sup"

<recipent-name> ::= <name>

<identification> ::= ("its" | "this is") <caller-name>

<caller-name> ::= <name>

<rationale> ::= <reason-for-calling> | <statement-of-fact>

<reason-for-calling> ::= ["I" ("was" | "am")] ["just"] "calling" ("because" | (<to-inform-you-of>)) <statement-of-fact>

<to-inform-you-of> ::= "to tell you" | (("to let you know" | "to inform you") ["that"])

<statement-of-fact> ::= "you suck" | "your rent is overdue"

<request> ::= {<connector>} <suggestion>

<connector> ::= "so" | "just" | "please"

<suggestion> ::= "jump off a bridge" | "call me back"

<bye> := (["good"] "bye") | "later" | "peace"

My Opinion of Relativity

1.) The correctness of someone else's opinion is inversely proportional to the square of its difference from one's own. 2.) One will adopt others opinions in proportion to their precieved correctness. 3.) Opinions cannot travel between people at infinite speed, therefore black opinion holes could exist. "Truth" is but a tear in the fabric of opinion-space where correctness approaches infinity.

Google Induced Synesthesia

I noticed that whenever I see the Google logo written in the correct font (Times new roman) it appears somewhat colorful. This is not actually synesthesia, just a normal human side effect of having an associative memory. But when I checked the order of the colors I was perceiving with the actual logo, they were scrambled! My brain remembered to fill in the fact that every letter of the Google logo is either red, blue, yellow, or green, no two adjacent letters are the same color, and there two blue letters and two red letters, while there is only one yellow and one green. this leaves only certain possible combinations that I could have dreamt up. So to test my prediction of the possible set of my predictions my memory would make of the order of the colors in the Google logo, I quickly scribbled out a list of the possibilities and then went back to the text where I originally saw a black and white version of the logo. But, to my surprise, after looking at the real logo moments earlier, my memory of the color order had corrected itself and my perception of the logo was now being rendered with the correct color order. Soon after this eerie surprise, I figured that the experiment would have been impossible anyways, because of the additional component of my memory of the Google logo that states that whatever the order, it doesn't change every time you look at it.

So, I pose an alternate, even more interesting test: If Google were to randomize the order of the colors in their logo within the rules stated above, would anyone notice?

diversions

so since its currently summer there won't be much on pattern recognition showing up here. I used to just have that sort of thing swimming around in my head all the time because I was always writing programs and taking adderall. Later on this year when fall semester gets going I'll be prongramming more and I'll have more to say.


As for now I have good news. The theories and tactics I have been using for my pattern recog and AI programs have already been discovered by someone else. Jeff Hawkins of the Redmond Center for Theoretical Neuroscience has already come up with it and he named it the Memory-Prediction Framework. Its described in his book, On Intelligence.

Probably not that amazing of an accomplishment considering that I educated myself in modern cognitive science but I still feel pretty proud that something I came up with mostly through introspection and lucid dreaming has also been discovered by a neuroscientist!

Reinventing cybernetics

Power measures the extent to which one can control one's environment. Control can only be accomplished when one understands the environmental system one wishes to control. Understanding of a system can only be had if one has the power to control for some variables while observing changes in others. power enables more science, science brings greater understanding, greater understanding yields more power. This amplifying feedback loop gives rise to the all too familiar and seemingly inevitable tendency of power to concentrate itself.

Couldn't a device be contrived to operate according to these principles? A tool that becomes more powerful with time? The answer, is yes. These miraculous devices are already produced in bulk all over the world. You already possess one, in your very skull.

The nervous system of Homo Sapiens may or may not operate according to different principles than the rest of the animal kingdom, but one thing is certain: there is a runaway feedback system at play. We become exponentially more powerful with the passage of time.

Consider a simple system S in an unknown environment with three inputs, a b and c and three outputs, x y and z.

The inputs are wired up to different sensors which each measure some unknown property the environment and represent it as a real number. now each of the outputs takes the form of a real number which is under the systems complete control. changing the number has some unknown effect on the environment, possibly through the action of a motor.

It is possible to design a subsystem of S, call it T that runs tests on each of the output variables x y and z individually and measures their effects on one of the input variables, a until enough information has been collected that the previously uncontrolled input variable a comes under virtual control via the intermediate output variables x y and z. S may now command a to change and the subsystem T will convert the instruction to commands for x y and/or z to produce the desired result.

The purpose of T, in a nutshell, is to bring more variables under S's control. Only one more thing needs addressing: the short supply of input variables for converting. some system must be designed to usefully subdivide them to add more members to the set of uncontrolled input variables. if a system could add useful inputs, then T could continue to convert them to virtual outputs, and S could steadily increase its control over its environment. there are a few more bugs to work out, but that is my idea of how to create a self empowering tool.

Education

Its not that education should be a career, its that every career should include education.